And, in other news, someone has posted several working examples of providers on the xda developers forum! Using them you can even run your own map server that work very well with 1.5.2. The examples are a great learning tool indeed

Is there any way to tell Locus not to cache tiles, or to cache for only a limited period? For example, I would like to try adding some traffic information, but obviously this changes quickly so I would need to disable, or limit, caching.

That's interesting. These appear to be the Ordnance Survey Street View mapping. This is published under the OS Open Licence, which is aligned with the Creative Commons Attribution licence. So in licencing terms it should be possible for Locus to include this in its distribution, with some attribution. The tiles have been reprojected to suit the Open Street Map system and are available at http://os.openstreetmap.org/. A suitable stanza for providers.xml seems to be

Excellent thanks tipichris.Looking at the OS website, http://http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-opendata.html , they have also included many other map types, including the 1:50 000 series. Are there variations on the xml above that will give access to the other types? I downloaded an OS map demo someone had made, but it wasn't a patch on Locus, except it has the OS map. But as you zoomed out from the Open Street map, it swaps to the 1:50 000 series. At the same time, my mate downloaded an OS map for the iPad, with offline storage and 3D views. Very nice.

Thanks for a great app as well menion.

I was going to report some large gaps in the locus version of the open street map, but I've just spotted they are present on OS website version as well, so not a problem with the provider file.

The opendata 1:50,000 mapping is not the OS Landranger maps that we all know and love. I'm also not aware of it having been reprojected in a way that is usable by Locus, unlike the Streetview data (but see here for a demo of using the data).

Locus used to include OS Landranger and Explorer maps but had to withdraw them because of copyright issues. You may find an addon in the market that puts these maps back. Just to look at with your browser, you can find these map series on Bing maps.